


Under the Rocks are the Words

by redonthefly



Series: Departures [1]
Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Departures AU, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:11:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3097733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”<br/>― Norman Maclean</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Rocks are the Words

**Author's Note:**

> Departures is the name of the AU-verse dreamed up by a bunch of wonderful tumblr folk. Read about it [here](http://counterpunches.tumblr.com/post/104107156247/youngbloodbuzz-counterpunches-jarmelts) or check out the tag 'departures!frohana' ; but the short version is: Anna and Elsa host a travel/nature show (Anna as a journalist, Elsa as main camera). Kristoff is their guide that, once hired, never really leaves. Adventures ensue.
> 
> Title borrowed without shame from Norman Maclean.

Anna has seen the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal; when she was five or six years old, she stood, red faced under her desert balaclava in front of the pyramids, clutching her mother’s hand and grinning widely at the photographer.

All the great wonders of the world, at one time or another - she’d been too young to appreciate most of them, adventures being lost in a storm of tantrums and missed playdates and imagined birthday parties and a childhood spent wishing for long summer days with squirt guns and super soakers and all the other trinkets of school aged children, drunk in greedily as ads and sitcoms in front of the television and the never ending summer tropics.

She’s seen the pictures, all of them, the carefully posed portraits of the family abroad, landscapes and architecture behind them in painted color, printed then carefully pasted into albums. They’re all more or less the same. Herself, variant of age aside, to the left of her mother, then their father, then Elsa on the far right, looking shades of uncomfortable in front of the camera.

So some things don’t change, at least.

The first time she told Kristoff about this - the seeing the world thing, the growing up on a tropical island thing - he’d laughed so hard he’d had to sit down, clutching at his knees and gasping a little while she stood there, tapping her foot.

“You’re serious,” he wheezed. “You’ve seen, what, most everyone’s bucket list, grown up practically in a  _resort_ , on a  _private island_ , and you want to now…go see the world? AGAIN?”

“I didn’t  _see_  anything,” she insisted, unamused. “We were really young!”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “The first time you see a snake and scream, that’s definitely going on the website.”

Anna pointedly neglected to tell him that she had a pet snake for years, because Kai recommended him and he’s also lovely to look at, and she’s not dead. Men expecting her to do something, be something, act some way - that’s not new either, not remotely; Anna has never been quite as delighted as when she’s proving someone wrong - I can, I will, I  _will_ , but that’s neither here nor there, when she’s trying to hire a guide in a dusty bar in Alice Springs based on nothing but a two line email that’s over a month old and a name scribbled on a scrap of notebook paper, tucked into her wallet.

The snake thing though, she won’t mind being a surprise. (It is, eventually, somewhere in Burma.)

*

Their parents die in June.

In July, she and Elsa sit knee to knee on the white leather couch in the formal sitting room and stare at the reams and reams of paper, stacked neatly into orderly little piles (for insurance, for charitable donations, for investment income, retirement accounts, trust funds) and try to make sense of the world.

They’ve been all over the globe, the two of them, somehow eclipsed by regret and poor memories and old accidents, but in this they are two together, shuffling through the numbers, the black and white ink, their future.

"I don’t know what to do," Elsa says blankly, and sets down her glass of water neatly on a cork coaster. Anna’s is making a ring around the names of all the people her father had traded goods with in September 2006; the printer ink isn’t true, is bleeding grey in streaks down the page. "Someone is supposed to help us."

Anna picks up another piece of paper, sets it back down. Elsa gets up, leaves the room silently, sunshine filtering in uncaring through the gossamer window shades, and Anna wonders how on earth the world is still turning, how the sun is still shining, how they have not been flung into space.

The shadows tick across the floor, and she keeps rifling through the papers - she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, their estate doesn’t mean much without mother humming in the morning or father smoking on the patio at night. It’s all just…blank pages, until she nearly knocks over her glass of water with her elbow, and unearths a fresh sheaf with the words ‘Galapagos Project’ printed in larger font.

Galapagos. Turtles.

She remembers, a little, gets up hastily and scurries to the bookshelf, pulling thick bound books off the shelves, leaving them in heaps at her feet, flipping through the pages frantically, until _there_.

Elsa and Anna, clutching each other around the waist, laughing, balancing on the back of a huge tortoise, mother reaching for them, slightly out of focus, smile broad, father red with laughter. It’s everything a candid picture should be. It’s their family, the way it should be.

"Elsa!" Anna yells, and hears her voice echo through the empty house. "I know what we’re going to do!"

*

So that’s the short version of how they end up here, on a raft, floating down one splintered off finger of the Urubamba river in Peru, definitely not floating happily by Machu Picchu, snapping pictures and getting a token clip to upload before they catch a plane (that they are most assuredly not going to make) that would take them to Africa.

Elsa is elbow deep into a Kristoff’s knapsack - there stopped being an ‘Anna’s pack’ or ‘Elsa’s pack’ or ‘Kristoff’s pack’ about six months ago, their belongs all mingling freely, distinguished more or less now by statements like “I think I shoved it in the green one”, which drives everyone a little crazy but no one has tried to fix.

"Okay," she says, heaving a sigh and sitting up a little straighter. "It’s gone, Anna, I can’t find it anywhere."

Kristoff groans, but doesn’t stop paddling; he’s using a shoe lashed to stick, and looks annoyed but not nearly as bad as the time they had to sleep in a tree, so Anna isn’t worried. Yet.

"It’s got to be," Anna says, and hauls the purple sack into her lap. "One portable camera battery, coming right up…"

Her fingers close on a book instead, and she pulls it out curiously. Her photo album, forgotten in the chaos and shuffle, the endless bouts of filming and scripting, the arguments about camera placement and transportation, Elsa’s clear laugh in the background of all their best shots, Kristoff’s animated storytelling in the evening, how it feels to wake up on misty mornings and grumble over strong coffee and dirt in their boots.

Okay, so it’s not their spare battery - or even the little portable camera, the one Elsa hates using but is good for hauling into small spaces and up trees - and it’s not the satellite phone, which would probably also be useful, but for a few minutes she indulges herself, trailing fingers over the pictures, carefully slipped into plastic sheaths.

"We should make another one."

"What?" Elsa looks up; she’s got the miniature camera out, is getting footage of the still river behind them.

"Our album. I think we should make another. Of us now. The three of us," she adds, when Kristoff throws them a curious glance over his shoulder.  "I think that’d be nice."

Elsa softens for a second, lowering the camera into her lap and peering over at the open pages.

"You’ve been carrying this?"

"Yeah."

"Anna, I - " She stops, swallows, and smiles a little wetly before clearing her throat. "…I would love to look at this more, but right now we need to  _get off this river_.”

All business, then. Anna rolls her eyes affectionately, and shoves the album back into the pack just in time to hear Kristoff yelp.

"Elsa - you’re going to want to get THIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiisssss!" His voice is lost in a roar of water, swirling suddenly white around them, the raft pitching this way and that, and Anna laughs, holds the purple nylon bag tight to her chest, and lets the wild take them.


End file.
